Have your say on government e-petitions

We call for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions

Submitted on Wednesday 12th December 2012

Published on Wednesday 12th December 2012

Current status: Closed

Closed: Thursday 12th December 2013

Signatures: 104,818

Tagged with

British ~ Education ~ Media ~ Universal Credit

Petition Action

We call for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions

Additional Information

We call for:

A Cumulative Impact Assessment of all cuts and changes affecting sick & disabled people, their families and carers, and a free vote on repeal of the Welfare Reform Act.

An immediate end to the Work Capability Assessment, as voted for by the British Medical Association.

Consultation between the Depts of Health & Education to improve support into work for sick & disabled people, and an end to forced work under threat of sanctions for people on disability benefits.

An Independent, Committee-Based Inquiry into Welfare Reform, covering but not limited to: (1) Care home admission rises, daycare centres, access to education for people with learning difficulties, universal mental health treatments, Remploy closures; (2) DWP media links, the ATOS contract, IT implementation of Universal Credit; (3) Human rights abuses against disabled people, excess claimant deaths & the disregard of medical evidence in decision making by ATOS, DWP & the Tribunal Service.


You can't sign this petition because it is now closed. But you can still comment on it here at Repetition.me!

Government Response

The Government responded to this petition on Tuesday 29th January 2013

As this e-petition has received more than 10 000 signatures, the relevant Government department have provided the following response:

Cumulative impact analysis is not being withheld – it is very difficult to do accurately and external organisations have not produced this either.

The Government is limited in what cumulative analysis is possible because of the complexity of the modelling required and the amount of detailed information on individuals and families that is required to estimate the interactions of a number of different policy changes. In addition, the Government's programme of welfare reform will not be fully implemented until 2017/18 and many policy details are still to be worked through. Equality Impact Assessments are however carried out for individual policies where there is a requirement.

No other organisation produces this analysis in a robust way. The Treasury does publish some cumulative analysis with each Budget but this is a broad brush assessment of all tax, benefit and expenditure changes since 2010 across households. Because the Budget cumulative analysis is so complex, it is not robust enough to break down by family type – so impacts on disabled people cannot be shown separately.

The IFS also produces some cumulative analysis but also do not feel the results are reliable enough to disaggregate for the disabled.

This e-petition will remain open to signatures until the published closing date and will be considered for debate by the Backbench Business Committee should it pass the 100 000 signature threshold.

Parliamentary Debate

This petition has reached the threshold for a Parliamentary debate, but the debate has not yet been scheduled.

Have your say on this petition!

comments powered by Disqus

repetition.me is a Good Stuff website

18.219.130.41 Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:28:36 +0100